Maryland Injury Law Center

This is one of the more depressing reports on medical malpractice that you will read. A recent study from Johns Hopkins has found that hospital staff members do not spot the vast majority of errors in pediatric chemotherapy until they have affected the child. According to the study, doctors and other health care providers failed to identify errors in dosage or administration of drugs 85 percent of the time. The figures drastically underestimate the number of errors in treating these sick children. But this does not mean that the child is not impacted by these medical mistakes. Many complications are never attributed back to chemotherapy because the child is so sick and at risk for so many complications.

Chemotherapy patients are vulnerable to these medical mistakes because there is no usual dose. The amount of chemotherapy received usually depends on body weight. Body sizes affect pediatric dosages. Chemotherapy exacerbates the problem because it is practically poison. Coming from someone who has taken chemotherapy, it is poison. For example, if you take three times the amount of OxyContin, you will sleep a little longer than you like, but no actual harm occurs. With chemo, this margin of error does not exist.

The Maryland Personal Injury Lawyer blog specifically avoids being trite or preachy. But let’s put that aside, just for today. Doctors and other health care providers have to be more careful in treating some of the sickest and our most innocent patients.

The Virginian-Pilot had an interesting article (the link is now lost) on Saturday regarding the punishment that the Virginia Board of Medicine gave to a Virginia Beach doctor who had admitted fabricating a patient’s vital signs during minor bunion surgery at Sentara Bayside Hospital. He prewired the oxygen saturation levels and EKG readings before her surgery.  Bunion surgery.  And she is dead.

The reason we know this little shortcut is that the patient, a mother of four boys, suffered catastrophic brain injuries during surgery, slipped into a coma and died.  A mother of four kids for no reason.  How frustrating it must be for the family to experience this tragedy.   They might at least think they would protect someone else’s mother.

Medical malpractice is the country’s third-leading killer behind heart disease and cancer. Decent doctors, who made unintentional medical errors while trying to do the best they could for the patient, cause most of these deaths.

A recent study by the “Journal of General Internal Medicine” found that doctors are loath to admit medical mistakes. Virtually every doctor in the study of 538 doctors surveyed – 97 percent – agreed that they would report a theoretical medical error. But only 41 percent said they had disclosed a minor medical error they made.

Half the doctors surveyed believe they have never made even a minor medical mistake. “It seems fair to assume that all of us have made at least a minor error, if not a major error, sometime in our careers,” Dr. Lauris Kaldjian, a University of Iowa professor of internal medicine said, stating the obvious to the Kansas City Star.

This study conjures up memories of the doctor Alec Baldwin’s character Jed Hill pretended to be in the movie “Malice”. Do this many doctors really believe they have never made even a minor mistake in their entire careers?

[I updated this post in 2020 with Baltimore-area shoulder dystocia verdicts and settlements at the bottom of this post.]

A Baltimore jury yesterday found a doctor responsible for the brain injury and death in 2003 in a shoulder dystocia case and awarded the child’s parents $8.1 million. The damages are limited to just over $2.1 million under Maryland law putting a cap on awards for pain and suffering.

During the delivery of the child at Mercy Hospital, the child’s shoulders became stuck in the birth canal. This condition, known as shoulder dystocia, occurs when the child’s head can clear but the shoulders require additional medical maneuvers for the child to be delivered. In shoulder dystocia cases, one shoulder of the baby usually is trapped behind the mother’s pelvis, obstructing the baby’s breathing. It is hard to conjure up a more horrific case. This Baltimore jury that heard all the evidence in this medical malpractice case determined the damages at $8.1 million. Why do we have a law in Maryland that only awards these Plaintiffs about one-fourth of what the jury believed was appropriate?